As a long term fan of the 1980’s BBC series, ‘Red Dwarf’, one of my favorite moments was when the crew were marooned on a planetoid inhabited by brain-sucking psirens. Lister went outside and was immediately accosted by a psiren masquerading as a long-lusted-after, voluptuous beauty, from Dave’s youth.
“How long has it been since you made love to a woman, Dave?” asked the blonde bombshell, curling her fingers into the crewman’s hair. “Three million years?”
Lister winced, knowing the psiren was only interested in sucking out his brains, but still finding her irresistible. “I prefer to think of it in terms of ice-ages,” he gasped, “that way it’s only six.”
It seems almost that long since I last posted on Sparrow Chat. Not that I’ve been lured into the arms of some raving beauty – Mrs Adams excepted, of course. The chaos of moving house has made any chance of writing impossible.
First, you need a computer.
“It’s in the bathroom. I think it’s in that box marked ‘toilet rolls’. No, not that one. The one on top of the one marked, ‘Christmas Lights’. You’ll need the stepladders. No, I don’t know where they are. I think the moving man borrowed them when he was charging his cell phone. What? No, I haven’t a clue why he needed the stepladders to charge his cell phone, I…..darling, can’t you see I’m busy? Go and find them yourself.”
Admittedly, it only took a few days to locate one of our four computers, but then there was the vexed question of internet access.
The local communications company had already retreated from their previous blase assertions that dsl broadband was available in our area, (everywhere in ‘our area’ apart from ‘our area’, it seemed) and a week of ‘dial-up’ using the oldest laptop in our possession because it was the only one equipped with a telephone modem, created such friction in the Adams’ household as to demand a call to the satellite company and to hell with the exorbitant expense of satellite broadband.
I have to say the technician who installed it did a very good job. It worked a treat, and I spent the whole of that evening setting up LANs, and siting my workstation. It was to be upstairs in the only room that wasn’t attic.
For the next three days it blew a gale and poured with rain. The satellite dish sat morosely on the back wall of the house, feeble and virtually useless against the onslaught of weather accompanying the Canadian low pressure area that traversed across Lake Superior.
Five hundred dollars to install, a hundred a month to run, and the bloody thing gives up the ghost at the hint of a rain shower. So much for modern technology!
Admittedly, the weather was unusually bad, even for the Upper Peninsula. Finally, it cleared away and the internet returned. But by that time I had two acres of lawn to mow.
Dave Lister finally escaped the clutches of the psiren and returned to the spaceship, only to find another psiren was already on board masquerading as him. The other crew members demanded they both play the guitar and when the psiren Lister played it really well they immediately shot it.
Demanding to know how they knew it wasn’t really him, Lister got mad when they all announced, “Because that dude could play, Bud.”
I feel great sympathy for Lister. My guitar is hidden away somewhere in this house and I doubt Mrs Adams would be too upset if it took me three million years to find it.
Hopefully, though, it won’t be another six ice ages before I manage to post again on Sparrow Chat.
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Who shot the albatross?
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